Authentic historical insight to Zionism

The
National Idea.

The
national idea has educated all nations to self-consciousness; it has
taught them to feel that their peculiarities are so many valuable factors,
and it has inspired them with the passionate wish for independence. It
could not fail to exert a deep influence upon educated Jews. It stimulated
them to reflect about themselves, to feel once again what they had
unlearned, and to demand for themselves the normal destinies of a people.
This task of re-discovering their national individuality, although not
free from pain, was lightened for them by the attitude of the nations, who
isolated them as a foreign element and did not hesitate to emphasise the
real and imagined contrasts, or rather differences, existing between them
and the Jews.